Are We All Nerds Now?

There was a time when being caught doing something nerdy would have sent my friends and I scattering, because being labeled uncool was the scariest thing someone could pin on us. Being smart, getting good grades, reading, liking comics and science and technology, and even just wearing glasses or the wrong shoes made you a social outcast, mostly because people who didn't like or do those things were bigger, stronger, and having sex. But as with any oppressed subculture, there was a revolt. And though it's not entirely clear when, the paradigm has shifted quickly and dramatically.

Bill Gates famously said, "Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one." But we've gone well beyond that point by actually becoming nerds ourselves, and almost universally. In only about twenty years — and probably closer to ten — geek culture has gone from the fringes of society to dominating and even defining pop culture. Comic-book films are consistently at the top of the annual box office, of course. Tech culture and gadgets have been embraced to the nth degree. And two guys who dress like robots just released the most talked-about album in the country (not to mention their influence on genuine pop superstars like Justin Timberlake and Kanye West).

We're all geeks now, but we also understand that geekdom isn't about the specific aspects of culture one obsesses over anymore — be it comics or sci-fi or whatever the jocks consider uncool. Instead, it's simply the inclination to obsess about those things in the first place, regardless of the trends. The impulse to own and organize every single issue of The Amazing Spider-Man isn't any different than the impulse to do the same with Lou Reed LPs, except that Lou Reed has always been considered cool. And this seems to be the first time that the general population has embraced the fact that the two can mix into some sort of cultural venn diagram.

A just-released study of more than a thousand adults by Modis, a national IT staffing company, confirmed that people are proud of passions that would have formerly been considered embarrassing, including 87 percent saying they don't "sneak their geek," as in hide obsessions from co-workers, friends, family, and significants. And if you ever end up in the warm embrace of my brother, a successful and relatively handsome 33-year-old New York banker, you'll have to endure the watchful eyes of not just one, but three 18-inch Batman statues displayed in his bedroom.

You might also be introduced to the Batman onesie I bought him for Christmas, which wouldn't be out of the ordinary, either: The same survey shows that 65 percent of responders aren't ashamed of superhero toys or clothing, including pajamas. The survey goes on to explain how geeks are considered intelligent, hardworking, loyal, employable, and even dateable. But, sorry, 69 percent of people still consider geeks awkward, because even some valiantly fought battles just can't be won.

Geekdom has permeated pop culture in at least two ways now: What was once nerdy is now cool, and the cool kids have slowly made their obsessions nerdy. In music, that means that Daft Punk — the aforementioned robots — can release an album titled Random Access Memories to breathless media hype around the same time that Bowie fans endlessly debate how The Next Day fits in with his other eras of work. And both are totally acceptable, but somehow the nu metal and rap metal bands that were so popular in the nineties have all but disappeared because of how ostensibly uncool they are now.

Two people dressed as robots have released the most talked-about album in the country.

"Rock had a total 'jock' mentality at the end of the nineties," Isaac Rentz, director of some of today's nerdiest music videos, tells me. "Everyone was barking at one another and everything on the radio sounded like Limp Bizkit or Korn. But in less then a decade, the pendulum swung completely the other way, and it became acceptable for top bands to embrace being smart, well-mannered, and esoteric.

"I was working at a record label in 2008 when The Decemberists had a top-twenty album, and I remember the head of the label — who made a killing off of metal in the nineties — saying, 'Kids like these guys? They look like math teachers.'"

Nerdom has also been embraced by hip-hop, both in the evolving style of guys like Jay-Z, Kayne, and Chris Brown, and in the actual lyrics. Wu-Tang Clan affiliate Killah Priest regularly raps about Christian symbology, old kung-fu movies, and the X-Men. And Kitty — formerly Kitty Pryde, a name based off the Marvel character — raps about anime, Seinfeld, and unfollowing assholes on Twitter. One of her songs has nearly a million views on YouTube and was in Rolling Stone's top twenty of last year.

The same goes for movies. Aging comic-book nerds are finally getting to see their obsessions projected back at them. If you're thinking of early films like Richard Donner's Superman or Tim Burton's Batman, consider that they were the exceptions to the rule, and those series usually went to shit quickly because no one producing them knew hardly anything about the heroes. As Cracked's Dan O'Brien points out, The Avengers, which made $1.5 billion worldwide, would've been unfathomable a decade ago.

I grew up in a time when "superheroes = money" wasn't tattooed on the lower back of every producer in Hollywood. Nerds like me had to accept that we'd never get superheroes handled seriously. We gave up. But now it's the future!… Wanting an Avengers movie that incorporated a bunch of other big-budget superhero movies 10 years ago would have been a certifiably insane idea. Joss Whedon pulled it right the hell off.

We live in a world where the number-one comedy on TV is about nerds and their inability to get girls, and what was just the number-one film at the box, Iron Man 3, has been knocked out by Star Trek. I mean, holy shit.

Then there's the more omniscient shift in what we openly display while walking down the street. The acceptance of technology like iPods and Kindles and smartphones and eventually Google Glass in about every corner of American life has been paramount in geeks winning the war against the cool kids. And the fact that the Poindexter fashion stereotype of Saved By the Bell and Family Matters has become a verifiable trend among musicians as well as "jocks" like Russell Westbrook and LeBron James, who regularly and proudly bust out their chunky glasses and loudly-patterned suits, may be the real flag-planting moment.

That said, for all the negative stereotypes about nerdom throughout the years, the Modis study shows that people now understand the incredible amount of confidence it takes to be a geek; to publicly support something you love regardless of its popularity, to explore and obsess about it if for nothing more than your own edification, and to boldly stand out from the crowd — because fk the crowd. That used to mean you were about to have your head dunked in a toilet, but over the last two decades that confidence, with a certain amount of added swagger, is what pop culture has become.

We are all nerd and geeks and dweebs. And we always have been, just in our own vacuums: I'm a nerd about time-travel science, 1990s NBA culture, and stand-up comedy. These are not guilty pleasure, just actual pleasures. And since this Saturday is Geek Pride Day — a celebration that almost seems antiquated, given the state of things — feel free to let your freak flag continue to fly this weekend and beyond, because these days you ain't cool unless you ain't cool, which turns out to be actually pretty fking cool.

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